*The Times and the Daily Mail were owned, with other papers, by Alfred Harmsworth, the 1st Lord Northcliffe, who was appointed Director of Propaganda by Lloyd George. His brother Harold Harmsworth (the 1st Lord Rothermere) owned the Daily Record and Sunday Pictorial and, after Northcliffe’s death, acquired the Mail.
†The so-called ‘coupon’ election of 1918 returned an overwhelming majority for the Coalition Conservative and Liberal candidates who were officially endorsed by the receipt of the coupon (a letter of support from the Coalition government). Seventy-three Sinn Fein MPs were also elected, but did not take their seats in the Commons. The label ‘Unionist’ (referring to the supporters of Union with Ireland) was still attached to some candidates and Conservative MPs were often referred to as Unionist MPs.
*William Lever was founder and owner, with his brother, of Lever Brothers, soap manufacturers. He built up a business empire with palm oil plantations in the Belgian Congo. He became Lord Leverhulme in 1917.
*The Triple Alliance between the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, the National Union of Railwaymen and the National Transport Workers’ Federation had called a co-ordinated strike in response to threatened wage reductions following the return of the mining industry to private ownership.
*Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson was assassinated in London by IRA volunteers.
†Guests at Chequers: Alfred Mond was Minister for Health (and founder and first chairman of ICI); Sir Eric Campbell Geddes, a brilliant administrator brought into the war government by Lloyd George to run the military railways, was subsequently appointed First Lord of the Admiralty (despite having no parliamentary or naval experience).
*Sir William Noble was Director of the British Broadcasting Company.
*John Wheatley, Labour MP for Glasgow Shettleston, was best known for the ‘Wheatley’ Housing Act of 1924, which greatly expanded municipal housing.
*Lord Sackville (Lionel Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville). Knole was the fifteenth-century family home of the Sackville-Wests, near Sevenoaks, Kent. Lord Sackville’s only child, Vita, was Harold Nicolson’s wife and Virginia Woolf’s friend and lover. When Lord Sackville died, and the inheritance passed to a male relative, Vita was left without a home, which led to the Nicolsons’ decision to buy Sissinghurst.
*A. J. Cook, General Secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain.
*Economist John Maynard Keynes and his Russian ballerina wife, Lydia Lopokova.
*Herbert Samuel, chairman of the 1925 Royal Commission into the Coal Industry. The recommendation of the Samuel Commission, including reorganisation of the industry and reductions in miners’ wages, contributed to the General Strike.
*Guild socialism advocated workers’ democratic control of industry, mediated through trade-based associations and inspired by the medieval guild system.
*That fight led to Lloyd George becoming the Leader of the Liberal Party for the first time, replacing Asquith who had been leader since 1908. As a result, a number of Liberal MPs left and joined the Labour Party.
†A reference to the ‘cash for honours’ scandal that engulfed Lloyd George in the mid-1920s. The scandal led to the passing of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.
*Letter quoted from A King’s Story: the Memoir of HRH the Duke of Windsor (Cassell, 1951).
†The King’s doctor, Bertrand Dawson.
*Margot née Tennant, the second wife of the former Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith.
*Allan Young had been a candidate in the Ashton-under-Lyme by-election of April 1931, the first election contested by Mosley’s recently formed New Party. He came a poor third to the Conservative and Labour candidates.
*Representatives of Britain, France, USA and Germany met to try to avert a banking collapse in Germany.
*Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading.